Kenneth Goldsmith: Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · appropriation, authorship, conceptual writing, concrete poetry, data, language, literary theory, literature, poetry, technology, text, uncreative writing
“Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.”
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
ISBN 0231149913, 9780231149914
272 pages
Interviews with author: CUP blog (2011), Mark Allen (The Awl, 2013).
Reviews: Andrea Quaid (American Book Review, 2011), Sam Rowe (Full Stop, 2011), Stephen Burt (London Review of Books, 2012), Amelia Chesley (J Electronic Publishing, 2012), Michael Jauchen (HTMLGiant, c2012), Grant Matthew Jenkins (James Joyce Quarterly, 2012), Andrew McCallum (English in Education, 2013).
Commentary: Special section of American Book Review dedicated to uncreative writing (ed. Doug Nufer, 2011).
HTML (added on 2016-03-01)
EPUB (updated on 2015-10-9)
Arndt Niebisch: Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, avant-garde, dada, futurism, mass media, media ecology, networks, noise, parasite, performance, poetry, radio, sound, subversion, technology
“The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century inhabited the media discourses of their time like parasites, constantly irritating and taking from them. Dadaists ripped images of a mechanically reproduced world out of newspapers and magazines and reassembled them in their collages. Futurists instrumentalized the brevity of telegraph messages for their free word poetics. Artists such as F.T. Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo constantly abused existing media technologies and hijacked public communication. This study traces these subversive tactics from avant-garde poetry to media technological experiments with radio tubes.”
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Avant-Gardes in Performance series
ISBN 1137276851, 9781137276858
250 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2016-3-15)
Comments (3)Vladimir Mayakovsky: My Discovery of America (1926/2005) [Russian/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, capitalism, futurism, poetry, russia, technology, united states
Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s – creativity and advancement, a ‘primitive futurism’. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs.
Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms a series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times.
First published as Мое открытие Америки in Russian in 1926
With an introduction and translated by Neil Cornwell
Foreword by Colum McCann
Publisher Hesperus Press, 2005
Modern Voices series
ISBN 1843914085, 9781843914082
138 pages
View online (HTML) [Russian]
PDF (PDF) [English]